Linewize - release notes

Classwize 2022-005

28 June, 2022

Welcome to Classwize 2022-005!

This release of Classwize features the new Screenshot History Report, a new reporting tool that lets you generate, view, and download reports of students’ browsing history as screenshots. Classwize now also lets you open Youtube videos in full-screen mode to avoid distraction.

New Features

Screenshot History Report

The Classwize Screenshot History Report:

  • Captures screenshots of a students’ browsing history every 10 seconds or each time they view another tab.
  • Makes available all screenshots within 30 seconds of being taken.
  • Stores screenshots up to 14 days.
  • Gives you access to your students’ screenshots taken from the active classes they attended in Classwize, including those that were run by other teachers.

The Screenshot History Report is available for teachers whose students are using Connect for Chrome. To access this feature, contact Classwize Support (United States (844) 723-3932 | Australia 1300 687 052 | New Zealand 0800 445 206).

Class Ready YouTube

Class Ready YouTube helps students avoid distraction by opening videos in full screen, while hiding comments, pre roll ads, suggested videos, like/dislike buttons, and other elements that can take attention away from the lesson. Students can still pause or play videos, adjust volume levels or set video resolutions.

To access this feature, use the Open Site feature in Classwize via Class Tools, Student Tile or Live View. Paste a YouTube video URL, then toggle Open in Full Screen Mode and the video will open in a new tab and play in full-screen for the students.

This feature is available for students using Connect for Chrome, Windows, and Mac.

Improvements

We’ve made a few improvements in the background to make Classwize work for you better:

  • Faster connection times
  • Better tracking of user devices

 

Classwize 2022-004

3 May, 2022

Welcome to Classwize 2022-004!

This release of Classwize helps you better manage your class with an updated Pause Internet feature.

New Features

Monitor your students’ offline activities while pausing the Internet (Windows & Mac)

Pausing the Internet for students using Connect for Windows or Mac lets you stop them from browsing the Internet and still observe what they are doing offline.

See the “Internet Paused” indicator

When you pause the Internet for a student or the class, the “Internet Paused” indicator will appear on their student tile and Live View. This indicator tells you who is temporarily unable to browse the Internet.

 

 

Classwize and School Manager (Cloud) Hotfix 3.1.102

20 April, 2022

Welcome to Classwize and School Manager (Cloud) Hotfix 3.1.102!

In this release of Classwize, we fixed a few issues with extending Monitor-only classes, notifications when students are modified in synced classes, and reconnecting Live View.

Extending class sessions in Monitor-only Mode

We’ve fixed a bug that could cause the Connect extension to stop working when you tried to extend a Monitor Only Mode class.

School IT admins receive email notifications on changes to synced classes

School IT administrators now receive email notifications when teachers modify students in synced classes. This fix now allows IT admins to make teachers’ updates permanent on School Manager and prevent overwriting of changes when syncing classes.

Live View reconnects when restarting a class

We’ve fixed an issue that prevented Live View from reconnecting automatically when restarting classes. Now, Live View reconnects automatically when you restart a class.

Classwize 2022-003

18 March, 2022

Welcome to Classwize 2022-003!

We’ve introduced a few improvements to Classwize by fixing a few issues with system incident alerts and Support display.

Fixes

System Incident banner

We’ve fixed a bug that prevented the System Incident banner from closing. The banner now closes when the user selects the Close icon.

Classwize Support button

The Support button within Classwize has been fixed. It will now display the contact details that the School has entered in the Classwize configuration page in School Manager.


Classwize 2022-002

22 February, 2022

Welcome to Classwize 2022-002!

The Student Journey Report is now integrated in Classwize. This highly requested feature is now available to approved teachers and allows approved teachers to generate reports on their students’ online activities within Classwize.

Student Journey Report Features

The Student Journey Report is comprehensive internet activity report for a single student that covers:

  • date and time of each visit to a site
  • searches made in Google and YouTube
  • videos that were viewed
  • whether a connection was allowed or blocked
  • how each activity is categorized

School time only

Classwize’s Student Journey Report only includes a student’s browsing history during the hours set as school time by your school or district’s IT department.

Create from Classwize

In Classwize, simply open a class and select BROWSING HISTORY > STUDENT JOURNEY, then fill out the Export dialog. The Student Journey Report will be sent by email.

Generate Student Journey Reports from the past 30 days

Most reports will take less than a minute to generate and can be produced for the past 30 days. Reports including the previous hour will be available one hour after they are requested.

How the Student Journey Report works

Only approved teachers can generate Student Journey Reports

Only selected teachers can access the Student Journey Report feature in Classwize. Teachers who wish to use this feature should request permission from their school or contact their school’s IT administrator.

Student Journey Report for Classwize must be enabled in School Manager

For Student Journey Reporting to become available in Classwize and for approved teachers, it must be enabled in School Manager. If the feature is not available for you, contact your school or district’s IT department.

Improvements & Fixes

Improvements to New Class creation

We’ve added a few tips to the Create New Class feature by briefly explaining what teachers can do when they set new classes in Teacher Mode or Monitor Mode. We’ve also tweaked the dialog’s text for consistency and clarity.

Fixed an issue with Class Settings

We’ve fixed an issue that could cause teachers to delete a class instead of removing students or teachers in the Class Settings dialog. Teachers will now receive a prompt that asks them to confirm if they want to delete a class each time they click on Delete Class.

Classwize 2022-001

21 January, 2022

Welcome to Classwize Release 2022-001!

This update includes a way for you to send feedback to the Classwize Product Team directly from any Classwize screen, plus a few improvements to Classwize’s load times and user interface.

Send Feedback

We’re introducing the SEND FEEDBACK feature so you can tell us about your experience and request new features. Your feedback will help us improve Classwize for everyone!

Better Look and Feel

We tweaked a few things in the background to give links and other visual elements a more consistent look and feel.

Faster Load Times

We’ve fixed a bug that caused an issue with loading classes for some schools. Now Classwize loads faster, especially for school districts that have a large number of classes.

Classwize 2021-007

3 December, 2021

Welcome to Classwize Release 2021-007

This week’s release is just a quick one to make some improvements for our schools that have Chat enabled.

  • We’ve returned the teacher-to-individual-student announcement feature to schools with Chat enabled. We had resounding feedback from teachers in these schools that they wanted multiple ways to message their students, and that meant bringing back individual announcements.
    Your school’s IT team can turn this back on using School Manager > Classwize Configuration > Message Students.
  • Chat now automatically toggles off at the end of every class, and we’ve added a little popup to remind you that will happen.
  • We’ve changed the meaning of the green and red dots in the chat interface.
    • Green dot: If you see the green dot, chat has been enabled and you have no unread messages.
    • Red dot: If you see the red dot, chat is enabled and you have one or more unread messages.

Classwize 2021-006

19 November, 2021

Welcome to Classwize Release 2021-006

We’ve got a bumper update for you this time, containing a lot of work we’ve done over the past few months to improve Classwize and release new features.

The big news is that we've been rolling out our new Classwize Chat feature to schools that have a Chrome environment. Classwize Chat allows teachers to direct-message students in their current class without letting students chat with each other. 

We’ve also continued to make big improvements to the Live View feature by adding the ability to take high-quality, time-stamped screenshots of students’ screens!

If you’re not at a school with Chat or Live View yet, don’t worry, we haven’t forgotten about you! We’re working hard to bring these features to you. In the meantime, we have made improvements to your Classwize experience, including making Google Maps much more responsive for your students.

For Teachers

  • Google Maps now loads faster for students than a particularly disinterested sloth.
  • The Latest News button now remembers if you’ve clicked on it since the last published update. 
  • Schools with large numbers of groups should notice that Classwize is snappier in general.
  • We improved overall performance by:
    • removing some unnecessary feature audits.
    • optimizing the way Classwize looks for information based on student emails and usernames.
    • stopping Classwize from trying to check against the list of restricted users except when it needs to. 
  • We’ve renamed the students’ Chrome extension from Linewize Connect to Connect for Chrome - Education. Students can see this name if they click on the Extensions button in their Chrome browser.
  • Class tools are now disabled in classes that don’t have any students in them. 
  • Classwize could get stuck on a loading animation if you tried to start a class from within the class. 
  • You shouldn’t need to refresh Classwize to get List View to appear with content in it. 
  • We’ve tweaked the design of the login page to make it more consistent with our other products. 
  • We’ve streamlined how you create Classwize rules. You can no longer create rules that only last for a few minutes, and all the ways you can create a rule now use the same popup. 

Live View

  • You can now take screenshots of students’ screens in Live View! Open up Live View for one of your students and click the Screenshot button to take a timestamped PDF screenshot of the student’s screen.
  • We’ve improved Live View’s performance by slightly lowering the resolution of screenshots and making some changes to the service we use to send data back and forth between your computer and your students’ devices.
  • You should see fewer cases of ‘Tab has not loaded’ when looking at a student’s active tab. 
  • Live View performs better for users in Monitor Mode.

Classwize Chat

  • We released Classwize Chat to Chrome-environment schools!
    • Teachers can direct-message any student in their class.
    • All messages are logged and timestamped.
    • Students can't message other students.
    • Chat only works while classes are running and school is in session.
    • Chat is off for each class by default.
  • The chat bubble now disappears on students’ devices when you disable Chat for your class. Sorry students, you can’t use the bubble to tell if Classwize is running or not anymore.
  • You asked for it and we’ve delivered it: hyperlinks now work in chat!
  • We’ve heard that everyone is pretty tired of unwanted push notifications, so we:
    • turned off push notifications for classes that you’re not actively looking at. 
    • stopped the ‘class ends in five minutes’ notification from appearing if you end the class early.
    • updated the chat interface with instructions on how to turn off push notifications entirely for Classwize through your browser.
  • Reading a message will now mark that message as read for all teachers of a class. 
  • Clicking outside of the chat window will close the chat interface.
  • If chat is turned off, clicking on the ‘Turn on chat’ button will turn chat on instead of sending you to an article telling you how to do it.
  • The Chat interface won’t show classes that you’ve archived.
  • We made the student search bar stick to the top of the student list so you don’t lose it when you scroll down.
  • We now let you know if you message a student who can’t reply because they’re not using Connect for Chrome - Education Edition
  • Students can send messages to the teachers of their class even if those teachers aren’t set as owners of that class group in School Manager. 
  • We changed the default font for the student’s Chat interface to be the ever-stylish Roboto. 
  • Classes with unread messages now appear at the top of your class list when you open up Chat.
  • The number in the unread messages button was off-center and that bothered us. A lot.
  • Teachers and school administrators who monitor or are co-teachers of more than one class and who have Connect for Windows or macOS won’t get spammed by chat messages from all of their classes.
  • Students should only receive the ‘your chat is being monitored’ message once per day, when they first open up chat, instead of multiple times per day seemingly at random.
  • We fixed an issue that could cause Classwize to crash when enabling chat for a class.
  • We removed some unnecessary UI elements from monitor mode. 
  • If a student messages you while you’re chatting with them, their message will automatically be marked as read.
  • We improved performance by only returning grabbing new messages from our servers, rather than all of them from all time. We also only get and show unread messages from the Class the student is currently active in.

IT Administrators

  • Parent and Child School Manager devices now have the same Classwize URL.
  • Google Classroom will sync all classes and students with School Manager even if there is a bad or external domain email address in the sync data set.
  • If you have enabled Safe Search on Bing, it will now only trigger for identified Bing domains and not any URL that contains the word ‘bing’ (e.g. www.climbing.com).
  • We’ve improved how the Connect for Chrome extension performs in Parent/Child device configurations by:
    • fixing a timeout error caused by a device id/authentication mismatch when the user was connected to the Child device. 
    • cleaning up our code for detecting whether the user was connecting to the Parent or Child device.
  • The Connect for Chrome extension no longer requires a restart if it fails to authenticate the first time, and we have improved how it handles authentication in general.
  • The config gateway no longer spams the monitor class endpoint.
  • The service that determines if a signature is blocked or allowed no longer accepts requests for a verdict if the requestor doesn’t have a school manager device ID.
  • We improved logging of Google authentication errors. 

Classwize 2021-005

2 August, 2021

Welcome to Classwize Release 2021-005

We’ve got some cool little quality of life improvements for you this week!

New Features & Improvements

  • Want to clear all your rules and start your class with a clean slate, but hate having to delete each rule, one by one? So do we! And that’s why we’ve added a Delete all button to the rules panel.
  • We’ve changed the header bar so that less space is taken up by our logo and more space can be used to show you important information.
  • Clicking on the ‘waiting on student activity’ won’t take you to a new page anymore. Instead, it’ll open the page in our help widget. Did you know that you can access our entire support knowledge base without leaving Classwize at any time by clicking on Help?

Classwize 2021-004

21 July, 2021

Welcome to Classwize Release 2021-004

Hi everyone, we’ve got some great improvements for you this week! The big news is that we’ve made it a lot less likely that you’ll see multiple student tiles for the same student while teaching your classes. We’ve also made a few things more streamlined, made more improvements to google syncing, and swatted some bugs while we were at it.

New Features & Improvements

  • Think there should only ever be one tile per student in your class? We agree! And we’ve made a bunch of improvements to how Classwize handles things like students going idle or having connection problems that means you’ll see fewer cases of students with multiple tiles.
  • When you hit pause on a student’s tile, you won’t need to enter their name in the Pause the Internet screen because it’ll already be there.
  • Your login experiences should be quicker and smoother if your school uses Azure directory services.
  • Google Sync will now sync students who’ve been invited to your class but haven’t accepted the invitation yet.

Fixes

  • Classes with really, really, really long names will start in a more timely fashion.
  • Classwize settings for different Group types (Teachers, Restricted, Exceptions, and Substitute) apply correctly to users in nested google groups.